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Transhumanism is an international movement which anticipates humans developing posthuman capacities in the near future.This work provides an introduction to transhumanism and the ethical and philosophical issues raised by radical human enhancement. The book investigates these questions in a way that is timely and accessible to the non-specialist.

Transhumanism is an international movement which anticipates humans developing posthuman capacities in the near future. This work provides an introduction to transhumanism and the ethical and philosophical issues raised by radical human enhancement. The book investigates these questions in a way that is timely and accessible to the non-specialist.

"More than five decades have passed since Jane Jacobs wrote her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and since a front page headline in the New York Times read, "Cars Choking Cities as 'Urban Sprawl' Takes Over." Yet sprawl persists, and not by mistake. It happens for a reason. As an activist and a scholar, Benjamin Ross is uniquely placed to diagnose why this is so. Dead End traces how the ideal of a safe, green, orderly retreat where hardworking members of the middle class could raise their children away from the city mutated into the McMansion and strip mall-ridden suburbs of today. Ross finds that sprawl is much more than bad architecture and sloppy planning. Its roots are historical, sociological, and economic. He uses these insights to lay out a practical strategy for change, honed by his experience leading the largest grass-roots mass transit advocacy organization in the United States. The problems of smart growth, sustainability, transportation, and affordable housing, he argues, are intertwined and must be solved as a whole. The two keys to creating better places to live are expansion of rail transit and a more genuinely democratic oversight of land use. Dead End is, ultimately, about the places where we live our lives. Both an engaging history of suburbia and an invaluable guide for today's urbanists, it will serve as a primer for anyone interested in how Americans actually live"--

In transportation, as in so many areas, the Obama administration is playing catch-up. But few other fields of policy offer such opportunities for innovation. Changing circumstances make attainable what once was visionary. And transportation's unusual status in today's polarized politics, as a field of legislation in which local interests trump partisanship, offers hope that Congress will be a partner in policy making rather than an obstacle to be overcome.

In the past sixteen years, America has seen a shift in preferences away from suburbanized, automobile-centric lifestyles toward urban areas with mass transportation. This article discusses the difficulties that cities will have in meeting this plan financially & with appropriate infrastructure, as well as the symbiotic roles that urban renewal & economic recovery can play together. Adapted from the source document.

The word neoconservative has (Internet search tools now reveal) a long prehistory of use in academic and quasi-academic writing to describe any new variant of conservatism. I found it used in 1883, in a periodical that featured excerpts from Karl Marx's new book Capital.

Newly elected Senator Jon Tester, reports the New York Times, is "your grandfather's Democrat—a pro-gun, anti-big-business prairie pragmatist whose life is defined by the treeless patch of hard Montana dirt that has been in the family since 1916." Virginia's new senator, Jim Webb, is an ex-marine who served as Ronald Reagan's secretary of the navy and writes novels celebrating the fighting heritage of the Scots-Irish. He writes that "The most important—and unfortunately the least debated—issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century." Pennsylvanians elected Senator Bob Casey, who is as much anti-abortion as he is pro-union. Former National Football League quarterback Heath Shuler of North Carolina won election to the House on a similar program, and joined the next day in a press conference with the new Ohio senator, Sherrod Brown, to denounce unfair trade agreements.

Discusses the earliest appearance in Dissent of the term "neoconservative" in the early 1970s, addressing whether its use was derogatory or descriptive. Adapted from the source document.